


Fight Song

by A_lot_of_fight_left (Amandabear189)



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst, Eventual Fluff, Eventual Romance, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, OC has future vision (sort of), Pietro Maximoff Lives, Pietro Needs a hug
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-07-06
Updated: 2015-07-08
Packaged: 2018-04-08 01:13:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 7,705
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4285059
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Amandabear189/pseuds/A_lot_of_fight_left
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After miraculously surviving the battle against Ultron, Pietro Maximoff is have a hard time finding a place for himself among the Avengers. After escaping to a coffee shop one day for a bit of time alone, he meets a young woman who always seems to know what's going to happen before it does. When her ability to see into the future attracts the attention of the rest of the team and he finds himself around her all the time, he begins to wonder if his place isn't wherever she is.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Heaven Knows (Prologue)

**Author's Note:**

> Hi all! Thanks for clicking into this little story thing here. It's my first fanfic so any comments or pointers you guys might have would be greatly appreciated! I hope you enjoy!
> 
> (Also, I'm a big music person, and a lot of the chapters will be titled after songs I associate with the things going on in them. The title of the story itself comes from Rachel Platten's 'Fight Song', which will probably make more sense eventually. This first chapter/prologue is titled for Heaven Knows by The Pretty Reckless, if you have any interest in knowing! Again, any comments or pointers you may have would be greatly appreciated, so I know if there's any interest in my continuing and how I can improve future chapters. Thank you!)

By all accounts, he should have been a dead man. Everybody else had believed he was. Even his own sister. Wanda had been inconsolable upon reaching the helicarrier and seeing him lying there, covered in blood and riddled with bullet holes. No one had been able to tear her away and in a way it was her grief that saved him. When she touched his cold hand she had been able to feel the smallest flicker of life still in him, slipping further away with each second that passed. She had screamed for the Avengers standing around her to help, and at first they hadn’t believed her. It was too impossible that he could still be alive; anything that she had sensed had been only desperate wishing. One of them- he didn’t know who, had checked for a pulse if only to placate her. He could only imagine how shocked they must have been when they felt his heart still beating. Weak and slow as it had become they had missed it before, but there was no denying it now. By some miracle Pietro Maximoff was still alive, and there was still a chance that they could save him. 

They had refocused all of their efforts on keeping him alive after that, even though they had known it was a long shot. When his heart had stopped beating during the journey home, the Hawk himself had been the one performing CPR, refusing to give up on the annoying kid who had ended up saving his life. It was a miracle that there was still any life left in him at all, and he wasn’t in the business of letting go of a miracle.

The second miracle, perhaps, was that Helen Cho’s cradle still worked. They had all assumed that the strike from Thor’s hammer that had given life to The Vision would have destroyed it, but the good doctor herself had already discovered that it still functioned. It had changed somehow after the pulse of magical lightning, and she had cautioned against using it again until she was able to understand what the strike had done. No one knew what it could do to a person now, but at that point it had been their only hope. Every one of them had known that it was a long shot. Their victory against Ultron had been a long shot too, though, and hadn’t they achieved that? One more miracle was all they needed. One more miracle couldn’t be too much to ask.

Somehow, it seemed that there was in fact one miracle left for the Avengers that day. Against all odds Pietro Maximoff had survived. He had refused to stay still long enough to allow Cho’s technology to heal him completely, but it had fixed enough that his body could do the rest. Wanda had been overprotective while he recovered, never leaving his side, and that had allowed him to see the way she seemed to be quickly finding her place among the superheroes around them. They had all come to see him at some point, each visibly relieved to see him alive. Even Barton’s wife had made it to see him and as she tearfully thanked him for saving her husband, he had assured her that he had only been doing what was right. Wanda would tell him of what she was learning and warned him that the Avengers would not be going easy on him once he felt like himself again and he had told her that he would have no trouble catching up. He never did, after all.

What he didn’t say was that he doubted he would ever be “himself” again. He had felt himself dying from those bullet wounds, and that wasn’t something he could forget. He should have been dead, and cheating death was never without consequences. Perhaps it was superstition, but he spent most of his nights lying awake waiting for those consequences to strike. When he had been told the truth about what Hydra was, he began to believe that he deserved the death he had managed to escape. He had spent his life working for the wrong people (first Hydra and then Ultron) and had no idea how much he had unknowingly helped them to achieve. While his sister seemed to be able to move past it and look to a brighter future, Pietro could not. 

If not for Wanda he would have left. He didn’t have a place here among “Earth’s Mightiest Heroes”. He wasn’t even sure he wanted one. Nothing felt right anymore, not since the day he should have died, and in the weeks since he had been retreating further and further into himself. Wanda, as well as she knew him, could see what was happening and had promised him that he could belong there too, that he did belong there too, but he knew it wasn’t true. He knew exactly where he belonged, even though he would never say it. 

Six feet under.


	2. Freak Like Me

She had been awake since just after three a.m. when a familiar ringtone had cut into her otherwise peaceful dreaming. Under normal circumstances she would have ignored a call at that time of night- hell, somebody would have to be crazy to expect otherwise. Only one person had that ringtone though, and she knew that he wouldn’t be calling her unless he really needed her help. Her help was of a very specific sort, and it wasn’t something he could get anywhere else.

“Who’s dying this time?” she answered, adopting the playful tone she usually used when talking to the old friend who had so inconsiderately woken her up.

“That really isn’t funny, Beth.” His tone made it clear to her that he wasn’t in a joking mood, so whatever he was calling her about had to be more serious than usual. The two of them had joked about much darker things than death, after all.

“What do you need to know?” That was what she was good at, after all. Knowing. 

“Somebody stole a kid from their bedroom, ‘bout an hour ago. Parents went to check on the kid after they heard a noise and found the window open with the kid gone. Fits the same pattern as two other kidnappings this month in other parts of the city. Both of those kids turned up dead within the week. Can you do that… thing that you do and find out where she is?” he asked. He never liked to talk about her unusual talent, but he had seen enough of it to call on her when he couldn’t leave things to chance. Unfortunately he didn’t seem very interested in understand it.

“It doesn’t work like that, Luke, I’ve told you that. It’s not a cosmic cheat sheet,” she sighed. Times like this made her wish that it was that easy. She could only see possibilities though, and only for people she knew. Strangers, she needed to be in close proximity to before she could see anything about what they may or not encounter soon. Luke called her because she could help him decide what path to take to get him to his goal- in this case, finding the missing child. 

“Damn it, fine. Can you tell me anything that will help, though?” 

“I can try. You know that possible paths get a lot clear when you make a decision, though. Until then I can only see couple of steps ahead. At least fill me in on which options you’re leaning towards the most?” At any given moment there were a million little possibilities, and a million different consequences for each of those million little possibilities. When she tried to use her “thing” as he called it, she was assaulted with all of them and it was always much too overwhelming to see anything clearly. Some possibilities were clearer than others if they were more likely, but she still needed to narrow it down to the most likely possible futures before she could get anywhere useful. 

“Well a neighbor mentioned some homeless guy that’s been creeping people out lately, talking to himself and all that. I was thinking about looking for him first. Even if he didn’t do anything he might have seen something, right?” he asked hopefully. Sifting through the images in her head like strings in a tapestry, Beth found the thread that led from pursuing that possibility, and was able to follow it a few steps forward, discounting the unlikely possible outcomes and searching for the branch that would be useful.

“Waste of time. If you find him, he won’t be able to tell you anything useful. I see you leaving disappointed and angry,” she said absentmindedly, ignoring the very fuzzy image a bit further down that possible thread. She was sure that a lot of these threads ended in a fuzzy image of the child being found dead, and he was calling her to find the one that didn’t.

“What about going to talk to some of the civilians who helped out with search parties for the other two? There were a few people helping with both that are also trying to organize a search party for this one, would any of them be useful?” he asked, frustrated already. He had always been impatient and dealt poorly with frustration. Maybe it was why they had broken up.

“Yes? I think? I can’t… There! Who’s that really tall guy with the dark hair? It looks like you’re standing in an office if you go to talk to him?”

“That one? Sounds like the first kid’s uncle. You think he’d be a lead? I’ll talk to him first, then,” Luke responded, sounding ready to hang up already and jump on that thread.

“Wait, don’t go yet!” Beth insisted, the possibilities further down that thread becoming clearer now that a decision to pull on it was made.

“You need to follow him after you talk to him.”

“What? Why? You think he’s the guy?”

“I don’t know, Luke, you know I can’t follow a thread that far. But it’s the longest one, and it’s got the most possible outcomes, and we both know that it usually means it’s the one to follow,” she explained. 

“So you can’t see if following him means I find the kid alive?” he asked. There was that frustration again.

“I can’t see that far Luke, I’m sorry. Things get too blurry and there’s too many possibilities. But it’s the best lead I can see.”

“Fine, then. You’ll tell me if anything ends up becoming any clearer, right?”

After assuring him that she would, Beth hung up the phone and let him get to it. It was easier to follow the thread once it had been set in motion, and she spent the next several hours doing just that, always able to make out a few steps ahead of where Luke was at that moment. He was able to follow the thread to its end without further intervention from her, and very little gave Beth more relief than seeing the recovery of a living child at the end of it. Luke hadn’t become a cop for nothing after all, and he was usually able to figure things out on his own. He was good at his job, or Beth wouldn’t have agreed to give the occasional assistance. Tampering with possible futures could cause serious trouble that even she couldn’t foresee, and so most of the time she kept her Sight switched off. For that reason, and because always knowing what would come next was more of a curse than anything most of the time. The only good thing that had ever come of it was being able to help out Luke every now and then.  
By the time everything was resolved and she finally could have gone back to sleep, the sun was shining through her window and she knew that she would never be able to. At least it meant that she was up early enough to stop by her favorite coffee shop and enjoy some breakfast, rather than have to run through the nearest Starbucks and stuff coffee and a croissant into her mouth on her way in to work. 

That was how she ended up sitting at the counter by the window, absentmindedly staring out the window as she sipped her coffee. She’d gotten there early enough that it had been nearly empty, but it was quickly filling up with the dedicated regulars a place like this tended to create. She ignored them for the most part, allowing their conversations to be the background noise that filled her head and kept her from seeing the darker possibilities she had been forced to dig through that morning. Using her Sight was stressful if it was on minor things, but something like she had done this morning always took a lot out of her. Even though those possible futures never came true, she had still seen them. It wasn’t easy to get the image of a dead child out of your mind, after all. 

At first she paid no mind to the man who took the seat at the counter next to her. A brief glance around told her that it was the only seat left at the moment, so the choice of it meant nothing and she could continue on as she had before. The mumble of conversation was comforting, and she allowed herself to lose herself in it until she was brought out of it by the ding of a text message on her phone. Luke must have finished all of the formal stuff with the case, because it was a message from him thanking her for her help and letting her know that the child had been found unharmed. She already knew, of course, and he was probably aware that she already knew, but it made him less freaked out by her Sight if he usually talked like it didn’t exist. 

Made aware of her surroundings again, she finally noticed how tightly the man next to her was gripping his untouched mug of coffee that surely had gone cold by now. Beth didn’t need her sight to know that he was obviously upset by something, and she observed him a little more closely from the corner of her eye.

He was dressed for jogging, which wasn’t unusual. The hood of his sweatshirt was pulled up and his head was down, hiding his face from her view. She realized that he hadn’t really moved at all since sitting there, but instead had just sat there staring at his coffee. He didn’t seem threatening, though, which was why she bothered to say anything at all.

“Rough morning?” she asked casually, still only glancing at him out of the corner of her eye and leaving things open enough that he could have ignored her if he chose.

“You could say that.” He spoke with an accent that Beth couldn’t identify and still didn’t look up from his mug of coffee, but she took his response as a sign that he wasn’t dead set on being left alone. People rarely were, Beth had found, and she knew that sometimes even a stranger’s company and conversation could be comforting. That was why she bothered.

“I haven’t seen you around here before. You new to the area?” His strong accent had already answered that question for her, but she wondered if it might be connected to his tension as she knew how stressful relocation could be. She was tempted to peek into the next few moments of his life and see if there was anything she could say that might improve his mood, but resisted. She didn’t use her Sight for trivial things. It only led to trouble.

“Yes. New to the whole damned country,” the stranger grumbled. The way he said it made her sure that it was connected to his mood.

“It’s rough, being in a new place. I’ve never jumped countries or anything, but I know it’s not easy moving anywhere. It gets easier, though,” she said in what she hoped was a casual but comforting tone. 

“What would you know about it?” he snapped, turning to look at her enough for her to see his face and realize that it was familiar. She was sure that she didn’t know him, but she had definitely seen his face before. Where, though?

“Not a whole lot, I guess. But I remember when I moved here. Never felt more out of place in my life. I figured it out eventually though, most people in this city do. Sooner or later we all fall somewhere we fit,” she said with a shrug, still trying to remember where she could possibly have seen his face before. 

“I doubt that,” the stranger grumbled again, sounding as though he had already decided that he was going to hate it here. If anything he seemed even more upset now than when she had first spoken, and that wasn’t what Beth wanted. Was there anything she could say to brighten this stranger’s day? Why the hell did he look so familiar?

A little peek couldn’t hurt. It wasn’t an invasion of privacy if she only looked at his immediate future for a second, just long enough to see what the right thing to say was and maybe see something that would give her a clue as to who he was. She took a sip of her coffee to cover the brief change in her expression as she peeked into the future, and it took all of her willpower not to react. In the quick flash of possible futures she had been able to pick out his name, and once she had a name to put to the face she realized who she was looking at. This was one of those twins she had seen on the news. One of the twins that had been fighting with the well known Avengers when a genocidal robot had tried to end the world. No wonder he had been hiding his face. 

Doing her best to look and sound nonchalant, she shrugged again. “Well if you don’t think you’ll fall somewhere you fit, why not make a place you fit?” she suggested. He looked at her now with a raised eyebrow, and now that she was able to see his whole face clearly she noted that he was much more attractive in person than the shaky news footage had made him look from a distance. His stare was intense, and for a moment she had to fight to find her voice again. She was sitting next to a celebrity, after all.

“And how would one do that?” Damn, that accent was something. 

“Well, that’s probably something you have to figure out for yourself, you know? But you can’t just not try, Pietro. By the way, you’re going to want to answer that. It’ll be important.” 

“What? How do you-” His phone rang before he could finish asking her how she knew his name, and he looked at her in confusion for a moment before seeming to snap out of it and answering it. Beth hadn’t turned off her Sight yet and had known that he would ignore the call if she didn’t tell him to do otherwise. She also knew that whatever was said would have him rushing out in a silver blur before he could ask her any more questions, and so she felt safe enough to give him that little tip before turning it off once more. A brief flash of wind was enough to confirm that he was gone, and Beth downed the last of her coffee before standing up and heading for her office with a silly smile on her face. After all, she had just met (and spoken to!) one of the Avengers. As much as she couldn’t stand her own ability, she idolized the people with powers that made them useful enough to save the world more than once. She knew it wasn’t likely she would ever see Pietro Maximoff again, especially since he didn’t seem to want to be recognized, but what a story it would be. Maybe she’d tell her nieces and nephews a few years down the line. Wanna hear about the time Auntie Beth met one of the Avengers? Yeah. That would really be something.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter is named for a Halestorm song. Let me know if you'd like me informing you of what song the names come from, when there is a song. They won't always be clearly connected, but I figure it would be something interesting anyway. =)  
> I'll be explaining a lot more about Beth's "Sight" in the next few chapters. Or rather, she will.


	3. Out of the Woods

When Beth stopped by the coffee shop with Luke the next day on her lunch break (his treat, to thank her for her help with the missing kid), she supposed she shouldn’t have been all that surprised to find it packed. Apparently there was a rumor going around that one of the new Avengers had been there the day before and considering the way most of the world saw the superheroes as celebrities, of course everybody who heard flocked to the little shop in the hopes of seeing one of Earth’s Mightiest Heroes. Rather than bother stopping she told Luke to just keep driving, since the shop was small and her break was nowhere long enough to get away with pushing through that crowd and trying to find a place to sit just so that she could enjoy some good coffee. The hype would die down eventually, she was sure. People tended to have pretty short attention spans when it came to that sort of thing. 

Sure enough, it was only four days later when the crowds abandoned the little shop in favor of a diner a few blocks down that Taylor Swift had apparently paid a visit to a few times last week. Beth was almost tempted to pass by it herself, but she figured it would be pushing her luck to hope to run into two famous people in one week. It was her first day off in a month and a half after all, and she yearned for the calming comfort of her favorite spot. Her apartment was too quiet and almost everywhere else in this busy city was too loud, so when she found a spot that she felt comfortable in she tended to get attached pretty quickly. 

Things felt so normal again as she sat at her usual seat at the counter by the window. So normal that she almost didn’t bother looking at the man in the jogging gear and the hoodie that sat next to her empty handed, assuming that it was much too far-fetched an idea that she could be running into the Avenger the media had taken to calling “Quicksilver” for the second time that week, let alone that lifetime. She looked anyway though, and was forced to admit that it didn’t matter how far-fetched the idea was because he was in fact sitting beside her once more, keeping his face angled so that only she would be able to get a good look.

“Well, I guess I know I frequent a good coffee shop if one of the Avengers has started coming here too. Kind of hard to enjoy it unless you actually order some, though,” she commented in another attempt at nonchalance, nodding towards his empty hands. 

“Who are you?” he asked, ignoring her words and fixing her in place with a quizzical stare. 

“Somebody with good taste in coffee?” she responded with a raised brow, not fully understanding what he was asking her.

“Are you one of SHIELD’s agents?” He asked it with a certainty that told her he already believed it to be true, which was probably one of the more confusing questions she had ever been asked.

“I’m sorry, but what?” she laughed, unable to respond any other way. 

“You knew my name. And you knew my phone would ring with an important call before it did. As a SHIELD agent, it makes sense that you would be aware of something going on,” he said seriously. 

Beth shrugged. “Logical conclusion, I guess. The wrong one, but a logical one. I’m not quite that cool.”

“A Hydra spy, then?”

That was even more laughable. “Um, no. And hasn’t Hydra kind of been beaten into the ground since the whole D.C. thing? I might not be super up to date on current events, but I’ve seen enough news stories on the internet to know that much,” she responded. They were certainly interesting theories, and if he had been thinking stuff like that it would explain why he was here, speaking to her, again. “Wait, have you been watching the coffee shop to see when I would come by again so that you could ask me this?”

He ignored the question. “How did you know, then?”

When she had been growing up and before she had gotten really good at switching off her Sight, Beth had learned how to think quickly on her feet and come up with an explanation for why she knew the things she did. This one was almost disappointingly easy compared to some of the sticky situations she had needed to get herself out of before she had learned how to shut things out.

“Hate to break it to you, Speedy, but it’s nothing as exciting as you seem to think. It might have taken me a bit to remember where I’d seen you before, but The Avengers are kind of celebrities. You and the other two new kids on the block were talked about on the news quite a bit after the whole ‘army of robots makes a whole city fly and tries to drop it and kill the world’ thing,” she explained with a smirk.

“And the phone call?”

She shrugged again. “I saw it light up in your pocket before the ringing actually started. Considering who you are, it was easy to assume that it was going to be pretty important. I didn’t think you’d be getting sales calls, after all.” He looked almost disappointed to hear such a mundane explanation for everything. “You still haven’t answered my question, though. Have you been staking out this coffee shop waiting for me to show up so you could ask me if I was some kind of super spy, or haven’t you?”

His cheeks colored pink at the question and it was really all the answer that Beth needed. “I was sure you… Why did you speak to me then?” 

Before she could explain to him that she had only picked up on his tension and wanted to see if she could help, she caught a teenaged looking boy working behind the counter staring at the two of them and quickly slipping his phone back into his pocket. She supposed that it could have been a coincidence, but a quick peek ahead told her that it wasn’t. They probably only had a few minutes before people started packing the place again, because something the boy had already done had alerted people that Quicksilver was back. 

“You need to go,” she said instead, turning back to the man sitting next to her. 

“I… I’m sorry? Have I offended you? I only asked-”

“The kid working behind the counter recognized you too apparently, and I just caught him stuffing his phone back into his pocket. My guess is that he just tweeted an Avenger sighting, and you’ve probably got about five minutes before people start getting here looking for you,” she explained. 

“But you haven’t answered my question.”

“And when tabloid reporters show up looking for an interview with Quicksilver, you’ll be too busy answering theirs to even remember that you asked me one. Put that super speed of yours to work and get out of here while you can still do so,” she advised, turning back to her coffee. 

“If you insist.” Before she even had the chance to register what was happening, he had lifted her out of her seat and she felt the air rushing past her like she was in a wind tunnel. Before she had the chance to scream for him to let her go, they were several blocks away in a mostly empty parking garage. Probably the first place that was deserted enough for him to safely stop without people seeing, but still. 

“What the hell is wrong with you?! You can’t just grab people and start running with them! Are you fucking insane?” Her anger probably would have been a lot more intimidating if she wasn’t breathless and shaky from being grabbed out of her chair and run several blocks away from where she started at super speed.

“You said to put my speed to work.”

“For yourself! So that you could leave before you were swarmed! What part of that sounded like permission to grab me and take me with you?” She was starting to feel like she was on solid ground again, and her voice strengthened as her balance did. He seemed to figure out that she was genuinely upset at that point, and he dropped the infuriating smirk that Beth might have been able to find attractive under different circumstances.

“You’re right. I should have warned you, at least. But I wanted to finish speaking with you before you disappeared again. Besides, if I had left you there they likely would have swarmed you instead. It would have been easy for someone to point out that you were the one I had been talking to,” he explained. 

Beth was still angry at being manhandled like that, but she begrudgingly admitted that his logic made sense. The second part, at least. Rather than yell again, she rolled her eyes.

“Well, I guess I can’t go back to that coffee shop again,” she grumbled. He fixed her with that quizzical stare once more. “Zipping around in a silver blur isn’t exactly how you keep a low profile, Pietro. If you had left me there, I could have told anybody who asked that I didn’t know you or anything about you that they didn’t and we were only small talking over coffee- which would have been the truth. But now that you grabbed me and ran off with me, anybody who saw is going to assume that you had a reason to take me with you. I’m a regular there, or at least I was, so they would recognize me if I went back and start the whole damn thing up again.”

“I didn’t think of that.”

“Of course you didn’t,” she grumbled, heading over to the edge of the row of cars to figure out where they had ended up. Luckily it was only a few blocks from her apartment building, so at least he hadn’t ended up dragging her to the other side of the city.

“Do I at least get an answer as to why you spoke to me though?” Pietro asked, appearing beside her. She sighed heavily, but decided that she may as well answer him.

“Because you were obviously really tense that day, and I figured you were upset about something and could use a bit of small talk to distract you. I wanted to be nice. People don’t always have ulterior motives, Speedy.” He was silent for a moment, thinking about what she had said, and she dared to chance another peek into the immediate future to see what he might say. Instead she saw the camera flash a moment before it actually happened. “Aw, shit.”

“What?” Pietro’s question was answered by the actual flash, and his head whipped around to see a young woman with a shopping bag in one hand and a smartphone in the other. 

“I can’t believe it’s one of the Avengers!” the girl said. Beth hadn’t shut off her Sight yet, and so she was able to see what Pietro was about to do before he even started moving. 

“No. Bad idea. This way,” she said, grabbing his wrist and pulling him towards the exit at a run. A human run, though.

“We could get away much faster my way,” he insisted, keeping up with her with barely any effort. 

“That’s how you draw attention to yourself. Ditch the hoodie.”

“What?”

“Ditch the hoodie, or halfway down the block you’re going to get recognized again and make this whole thing a lot more complicated.”

“How do you know that?”

“Less talking, more ditching the hoodie.” Instead of arguing further he did as she said, tossing the hoodie aside like a paper bag. By this point they were out of the parking garage and headed in the direction of her apartment, which Beth knew was the safest place to head to as long as they could avoid attracting any more attention. Since she was still using her Sight, she knew exactly how to do that.

More than once she changed their course with no warning, offering sentence long explanations when he questioned her and powering ahead at a brisk walk now. She had proven right enough times that he stopped questioning before long. Once they reached the alley that led to the door of her building she finally allowed herself to relax, seeing no more threats. Well, except for the question that Pietro was about to ask.

“Are you going to tell me how you knew all of that?”

“All of what?” she responded half-heartedly. She already knew that he had figured it out. The thread that started with him believing whatever bullshit explanation she could come up with was so fragile she knew it wasn’t going to work. A few steps down the thread they were already on, and she could see herself explaining some of the basics of what she could do. This was one of those uncommon occasions where there were really only two possible outcomes, so she shut off her Sight. She didn’t need it to know she was screwed.

“Every detail of what we might run into on our way to… wherever this is. Before it actually happened.”

“First of all, this is where I live. And you might as well come inside, because there’s no short answer and I already know you’re not going to let this go. Tell anybody what I’m about to tell you, though, and I’ll kill you.” It was an empty threat as she had no ability that could kill a damned Avenger, but if he believed that she did she just might be able to convince him to keep her secret for her. She could tell that he doubted her, but he at least gave her a nod. Sighing as though today had been the most exhausting in her life, she pulled her keys out of her pocket and unlocked the door, heading up to her apartment fully aware that he would follow.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Song for this chapter is Out of the Woods by Taylor Swift, because for some reason my mind decided it was the proper soundtrack for them trying to avoid the people rushing for a look at a celebrity. Not sure why, but I'm not sure why my mind does half the things it does. =)


	4. How It Works

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> No song for this chapter, guys, but feel free to associate your own with it! Tell me if you do, because I'm curious and always up for being introduced to new music. New inspiration and all that. =p  
> Enjoy!

“So… You can see into the future?” Pietro asked. It was the first thing either of them had said in the past several minutes since entering her small, cluttered apartment and as much as Beth had been dreading having to try and explain what she could do, the awkward silence had been so heavy that she was relieved when it was broken.

“Sort of. It doesn’t really work like movies and TV say it does,” she admitted. In fact, everything she had ever seen where a somebody could See like she could was so inaccurate that it was physically painful to watch. The future was never so simple as to be a single linear progression of events. 

“Did you know what would happen with Ultron?” he demanded. Beth wasn’t really surprised about it though. It was annoying, but it made sense to ask. 

“It doesn’t work like that. It isn’t like people think, where I get some kind of dramatic vision of impending doom. It’s difficult to know anything if it doesn’t involve me directly. It’s easier to figure things out for people I know well, though I can See a few minutes or so ahead for someone in close physical proximity,” she explained with a shrug. 

“Like the call in the coffee shop when I met you? Did you know what it would be about, then?” He seemed confused by the whole thing, which she had expected, but he did seem to be trying to understand it. Hell, after all these years Beth didn’t completely understand it herself.

“Not what it would be about, no. But I saw that you would get an important phone call that would make you rush out. I saw that you would ignore it if I didn’t tell you to pick it up, which would make whoever it was keep calling, so I figured I would save you the time.”

“So you also saw what did not happen?”

“Kind of. I see options. At any moment in time there are a million different possibilities for what could happen next. Each of those possibilities has a million different possible outcomes of its own. Some are always more likely than the others, so I see them much more clearly. If I’m looking at somebody specific I can see a few steps down their future depending on what’s most likely to happen and the choices they’re most likely to make. I’m probably doing a terrible job of explaining it, but it’s almost like each potential series of events is a thread, with the possible outcomes branching off, and the outcomes of the outcomes branching off again, and weaving this weird sort of tapestry of possibilities,” she told him. Picturing it like that was a trick she had learned when she was young, since it was much easier to figure out the tangled web if she imagined following threads. 

“I understand… I think?” Pietro responded hesitantly, and Beth couldn’t help but laugh.

“I doubt it. But that’s okay, because I’m fully aware of how weird it is.”

“Did you know I would come to the coffee shop to speak to you again today?”

“No. I learned how to block it out and switch the Sight off years ago, and I rarely use it anymore. It’s exhausting, being assaulted with millions of possibilities for every moment of my life when it’s almost always the same routine. Not to mention that people tend to get freaked out when you know everything they’re going to say and do before they actually say or do it. People don’t really want to be around you after that,” she explained, a slight bitterness creeping into her voice.

Back when she was young and didn’t know how to turn the Sight off, she would always react to the things she saw happening before they actually did. People had been scared of her, and ostracized her because of it. It had scared her parents too, and she learned pretty quickly that it was better to block it all out. The damage to her reputation and social life had already been done, but at least it wouldn’t get any worse. 

“You can turn it off? Just like that?” he asked. 

“Well, it wasn’t easy to learn how to do, but basically. It’s a near constant effort, though. Back in school they said I had ADHD. The truth was that I was putting most of my focus into not seeing what my mind was naturally picking up. By now it’s something I’m used to, though. Like covering up that tapestry I mentioned before with a sheet. It’s there, and I know it’s there, but it’s hidden,” she said with a shrug. It was pretty efficient, now that she had perfected her method. Very, very rarely something would force its way through, but it was normally a warning that she was about to get seriously hurt or killed within the next few minutes if she didn’t change the path she was on immediately. She had gone out of her way to make sure that her life was a boring one, so that wasn’t really something that happened a lot.

Pietro was quiet for a moment, processing everything that Beth had just explained to him. He hadn’t freaked out, at least, but Beth supposed that when he was living with the Avengers after fighting off an army of robot drones she just looked like a girl with an odd personality quirk. When one of your roommates could turn into a giant green rage monster there probably wasn’t a lot that seemed strange anymore. The thought was kind of refreshing, and probably why she had been able to get through the whole confession without a whole lot of trouble. 

“Maybe you should play the lottery,” he finally said with a smirk, and Beth rolled her eyes. She’d heard jokes like that before, but she didn’t see her Sight as something to joke about.

“It’s not something I use to play games, you know. Messing with the future is dangerous, and it almost always has consequences if you try to do anything big. Threads get tangled, after all. Sometimes when you try to prevent something awful, you end up doing the exact thing that causes it. And it’s your fault for screwing around and panicking without understanding what was really going on, because you didn’t take the time to untangle the threads,” she said firmly. Beth didn’t believe in fate in the traditional sense, but she saw more clearly than most people that every action had consequences. When threads got tangled and she tried to change the consequence without knowing what had gotten her there, bad things happened. She had learned that the hard way. 

Pietro’s expression sobered, and Beth felt her shoulders sag. She knew he was only joking, but she could be kind of overly sensitive about her Sight. It always made her angry when people acted like seeing the future was a gift, because in her life it had proved to be nothing more than a very heavy cross to bear. She’d made terrible mistakes trying to change the big stuff before, and that was going to be on her conscience forever. 

“I’m sorry. I didn’t think of it like that. That was rude of me,” he said quietly, and Beth sighed.

“Forget it, it’s not a big deal. I just get touchy. People are always forgetting that everything in this world has a consequence. I guess it just pisses me off that I can’t, you know?” she admitted. Pietro nodded solemnly. After a moment of thought, he spoke again.

“Do you want to know how I came to be with the Avengers? The real story?” he asked. Beth looked at him with a raised eyebrow, unsure what it had to do with anything they had been discussing, but eventually nodded. He seemed serious, and she had to admit that she was curious.

“My sister and I, we weren’t born this way. When we were very young, our home was in the middle of a bombing. It killed our parents and many other people we knew. It should have killed us too. There was a bomb that landed very close to us, but somehow it didn’t go off. We spent days trapped in the rubble. All we could think about was the name on the side of that bomb, the name of the man who, in our minds, had caused all of this destruction. Stark,” he began.

“Stark as in Tony Stark? As in Iron Man, Tony Stark?” she interrupted. Pietro nodded, then continued.

“When we were finally freed, we wanted revenge. Eventually, it led us into the hands of Hydra.”

“As in evil organization of Nazis, Hydra?”

“Do you want to hear this, or not?”

“Sorry. Go on.”

“They experimented on us. Made us the way we are. When the base we were kept in was brought down by Stark and the rest of the Avengers, we knew we had to find revenge another way. That was when Ultron found us. We agreed to help him, and he promised that we would finally have our revenge. We were a big part in him getting as close as he did to destroying us all. We didn’t know what he planned to do, and when we realized we ran. But the damage was done. He very nearly won in Sokovia, you know. I should have died there. I don’t know how I didn’t, with the bullets in me. But I survived. And here we are now.” 

For a moment, Beth couldn’t speak. The expression on his face was one of a tortured man, and she felt her heart break for him. 

“Why… why did you tell me all of this, Pietro?” she asked, her voice shaking. 

“You said it yourself. Everything in this world has consequences. What do you think mine will be when it is all said and done?” he said, a bitter smirk on his face. 

Oh. That was why. Maybe he could understand her better than she thought he could. A heavy silence hung between them once more.

“You know, you never even asked for my name,” she pointed out. Anything to get that tortured look off his face, she would try. It seemed to work, and he looked up at her with the same smirk he had joked with before. 

“How terribly rude of me. Would you do me the honor of telling me?” Her smirk matched his now.

“It’s Beth. Beth Bishop,” she informed him. 

“Well, Beth Bishop, it’s quite lovely to meet you.”

***

He stayed for a little while longer, talking with her about nothing in particular. It had been the first time Beth could remember feeling connected with someone; the first time she felt like she could relate to somebody. She couldn’t be sure, as the conversation didn’t grow serious again, but she had a feeling he felt similarly. At the very least, he promised to help her find a new favorite coffee shop when he was next able to get away from the Tower, since it was kind of his fault she couldn’t go back to her original favorite. 

Even with no solid ‘when’ in her mind, Beth found herself excited for it like a kid for a carnival. In just a few days her life had gone from boring and routine to quite the upset, and just this once she was going to let herself believe it was going to be in a good way.


End file.
